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. . . NORTH KOREA see "COMMUNISM" see "PLACES" for related links Of repression and famine in Iraq and North Korea Ross Mackenzie October 30, 2003 [. . . ] A new report written for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea by David Hawk, a chronicler of the Cambodian genocide, is titled: "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps." Hawk's report notes that torture, including the use of isolation cells and beatings, is common. Food deprivation appears to be the central way of controlling inmates. Work with livestock is coveted because prisoners have "the opportunity to steal animal food and even pick through animal droppings for undigested grains." The Post quotes at length an account by one North Korean woman, a defector, of cannibalism: "We started seeing cannibalism. You probably won't understand. When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby and ate the baby with another woman. ... I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. ..." Another woman was held in a 5-foot-by-5-foot underground cell for 14 months - where, according to The Post - she was regularly tortured, denied sleep, doused with water and forced to kneel naked on ice. Sentenced to death, she was later reprieved and sent to a political prison camp. "Those seven years in prison still haunt me. I have seen so many different ways to kill and torture people. I still see them in my dreams." She and another woman told of being repeatedly sold in and out of sexual slavery. Currently, North Korea's highest-ranking defector - Hwang Jang Yop - is on a visit to the United States. Now 80, he defected to South Korea in 1997 after serving as a confidant to Kim Il Sung (North Korea's late leader) and a mentor to his son, Kim Jong Il (who succeeded his father). Two quotes from Hwang: (1) "I came here to tell the world about North Korea. By the time I left, more than 1.5 million North Koreans had died of hunger. ... I could not endure it any longer. Kim Jong Il was only preoccupied about holding onto his power. He did not worry about the destruction of our nation." (2) "North Korean society has turned into a dark world of totalitarianism highlighted by hereditary succession of leadership and feudal patriarchy. The upshot of all this is famine and mass exodus of its people while the regime spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build the mausoleum for Kim Il Sung's dead body." And so the catalogue goes endlessly on. Yet it remains as stark justification for America's abiding efforts to write "finis." ©2003 Tribune Media Services -- Editorial in _The Wall Street Journal_ April 19, 2006 When President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao sit down together at the White House tomorrow, there will be a young North Korean woman in the room with them -- at least she will be there in spirit. Her name is Kim Chun-Hee and she has been missing since December, when she was arrested in China and deported back to North Korea. It isn't known whether she is dead or alive. We wish we could run a picture of Ms. Kim, but to our knowledge none exists. Perhaps that is cruelly appropriate since she represents a humanitarian crisis that most of the world doesn't know exists: the plight of tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in northeast China. The North Koreans have fled to China seeking food, work or -- odd as it may seem in a Communist country -- a little taste of freedom. In return, China tracks them down and repatriates them. This is effectively a death sentence since Pyongyang deems leaving North Korea a crime, punishable by execution or the gulag. The lucky ones escape Chinese detection -- often by bribing officials with sex or money -- and eke out a subsistence hiding in forests. The truly fortunate live off the goodwill of ethnic Koreans or find their way to the underground railroad that American and South Korean activists fund to help refugees reach safety in third countries. It is a treacherous journey, made more difficult because the malnourished North Koreans are an average five inches shorter than Korean-Chinese and therefore easier for bounty-hunting law-enforcement officials to spot. While North Korea bears ultimate responsibility for these abuses, Beijing is a willing facilitator. China refuses to permit the United Nations to help the refugees in any way, or even to interview them. This is a violation of its obligations under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which it is a signatory. Three weeks ago, on the eve of the Chinese President's visit, the White House took the extraordinary step of issuing a "Statement on China's treatment of Kim Chun-Hee." This is diplomat-speak for: North Korean refugees in China will be high on tomorrow's agenda. Mr. Bush is expected to urge Mr. Hu to let the U.N. set up temporary camps in China until the refugees can be transferred to third countries. Several are willing to be transit ports, providing China doesn't object and the U.S. provides funding. From there they would go on to South Korea, whose constitution requires it to accept all refugees from the North. Or to the U.S., which has yet to exercise a 2004 law authorizing asylum for North Korean refugees. Mr. Bush might also tell Mr. Hu of a movement gathering steam in this country among some evangelical Christians, human-rights groups and the AFL-CIO to push for trade sanctions on China if it doesn't assist these Korean refugees. We don't agree with such a policy, but it is an indication of how the refugee issue has the potential to be politically explosive. In a recent meeting at our offices, Jay Lefkowitz, the U.S. envoy on North Korean human rights, recounted Ms. Kim's story and called her a "hero." Every movement needs heroes, he said. "Either she will be a living figure in a jail somewhere or, God forbid, she'll be a martyr."  . . see ISRAEL v PALESTINE ...Although the past four years have been dismal for the Israeli economy, they have rendered the Palestinians destitute. Consider: • Average personal income for Palestinians declined by more than one-third; more than half were reduced to poverty, and unemployment levels are nearly 30%. • Employment among males aged 15 to 24 years stands at 43%, and up to 70% of new entrants into the job market since 2000 are unemployed. • Even with the population growing at 5.2 %, GDP per capita plummeted. • The age group that will be entering the labor force over the next 10 years (ages 10 to 19) is seven times larger than the age group exiting. • Palestinian exports declined in value by 45% and imports contracted by one-third. • About 22% of the work force is government-employed. The Palestinian Authority has become the employer of last resort. --Mr. Yago, director of capital studies at the Milken Institute, is currently supervising the Koret Knesset Fellows program. Mr. Prince is president of the Democracy Council and consultant to the Palestinian Investment Fund. end page . . The Patriot Act: Wise Beyond Its Years By JOHN ASHCROFT October 26, 2004; Page A24 The Wall Street Journal "[The Patriot Act] takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. It will help law enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike." -- President George W. Bush, at the Patriot Act signing ceremony, on Oct. 26, 2001. The Patriot Act turns three today, but its age belies its experience -- and its phenomenal success. Over the past 36 months, the Patriot Act has proved itself to be an indispensable tool that the men and women of law enforcement use to combat terrorism and to compile a record of accomplishment that has grown even as their responsibility for the safety of Americans has increased. The Patriot Act enhanced communication on every level of law enforcement to combat terrorist threats, while also giving investigators the same tools to use in terrorism cases that they were using to combat other serious threats. Armed with these tools, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents have pursued and captured operatives in the war on terrorism from Florida to New York, from Virginia to Oregon and points in between. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 368 individuals have been charged and 194 have been convicted. Despite the documented successes in keeping Americans safe from terrorism, the Patriot Act rarely receives its due, and indeed is often portrayed in an outright false light. Take the latest example. Just last month, several major news organizations erroneously reported that a federal judge in New York had overturned "an important surveillance provision" of the Patriot Act. In fact, the judge ruled on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and passed in 1986, 15 years before the Patriot Act. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to print corrections the next day. Time and again, the image of the Patriot Act is at odds with the facts on the ground. Three years ago today, Congress passed, and President Bush signed, a piece of long-overdue legislation that has been critical to keeping Americans safe and free. The parade of witnesses that appeared before the 9/11 Commission spoke of the importance of the Patriot Act. Former Attorney General Janet Reno and many others credited the Patriot Act with updating the law to deal with terrorists, and, most critically, for tearing down the "wall" in terrorism investigations that restricted the communication and cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence officials. This new ability to share information helped U.S. law enforcement, working with German authorities, to break up an alleged al Qaeda fund-raising plot in Germany. Here in the United States, the Patriot Act helped federal, state and local law enforcement dismantle the "Portland Seven" terrorist cell in Oregon, as well as cells in Seattle and New York, and alleged terrorist financers in Florida and Texas. The Patriot Act has also been successful in updating anti-terrorism and criminal laws to bring law enforcement up to date with technology. Pre-Patriot Act, a new court order was required to continue surveillance of a suspected terrorist whenever he switched phones. The Patriot Act gave anti-terrorism investigators the same authority that investigators in criminal cases had to get a single court order allowing surveillance of every phone a suspect uses. Common sense dictates that tools that help fight the drug lords should be available to protect the American people from terrorist attacks. The Patriot Act also increased penalties for not only those who commit terrorist acts, but for those who provide support to terrorists as well. In particular, the Act enhanced law enforcement's ability to crack down on unlicensed foreign money transmittal businesses, a favored method of financing for terrorists. Prosecutors in New Jersey recently used the Patriot Act to convict Yehuda Abraham, whose services were used in a plot to sell shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to terrorists with the understanding that they were going to be used to shoot down U.S. commercial aircraft. The Patriot Act has proved its usefulness beyond the war on terrorism in protecting our most vulnerable citizens from harm. During the course of drafting and debating the Patriot Act in 2001, Congress wisely decided to provide some investigative tools for all criminal investigations, including terrorism investigations. The result? In pedophile and kidnapping investigations, for example, a delay can literally mean the difference between life and death for a child. For years, investigators could subpoena some information from Internet service providers. But filing subpoenas to get information quickly to identify and locate a suspect could cost life- saving time. Section 210 of the Patriot Act changed that. In Operation Hamlet, sexual predators were using the Internet to exchange photos and videotapes of children being sexually abused. Sometimes the abusers molested children while running a live feed via a Web cam; this allowed other child sexual abusers to watch in real-time online. Investigators used the Patriot Act to quickly obtain subpoenas for information from Internet service providers. The sexual predators were identified, and 19 were convicted. More than 100 children were spared further harm. The Patriot Act has helped law enforcement achieve more safety and security for the American people without any abuse of civil liberties. Misleading rhetoric aside, not a single instance of abuse under the Act has been cited by any court, the Congress or the Justice Department's own Inspector General -- not one. The public has expressed overwhelming support for the Patriot Act in opinion poll after opinion poll. They know what the 9/11 Commission affirmed: that for the past three years, America's families and communities have been safer, and their freedom is enhanced because of the president's resolve and leadership, the foresight of Congress in enacting these vital tools, and the courageous men and women on the front lines who have used the Patriot Act to protect our lives and liberties. Mr. Ashcroft is the attorney general -- Patriot Fixes By BOB BARR November 12, 2004; Page A12 The Wall Street Journal The most common charge levied against critics of the Patriot Act -- one that Alberto Gonzales, the new face of Justice, is likely to repeat in his days ahead -- is that they're "misinformed." Well, as a former U.S. attorney appointed by President Reagan, a former CIA lawyer and analyst, and a former Congressman who sat on the Judiciary Committee, I can go mano a mano with any law-enforcement or intelligence official on the facts. And the facts say that the Patriot Act needs to be reviewed and refined by Congress. Critics of the Act are not calling for full repeal. Only about a dozen of the 150 provisions need to be reformed; these, however, do ose singular threats to civil liberties. Here's how to bring them back in line with the Constitution. The two most significant problems are sections 213 and 215. The first authorized the use of delayed-notification search warrants, which allow the police to search and seize property from homes and businesses without contemporaneously telling the occupants. The Justice Department often claims that this new statutory "sneak and peek" power is innocuous, because the use of such warrants was commonplace before. Actually, the Patriot Act's sneak and peek authority is a whole new creature. Before, law enforcement certainly engaged in delayed-notification searches, especially in drug investigations. Importantly, this authority was available in terrorism investigations. Courts, however, put specific checks on these warrants: They could only be authorized when notice would threaten life or safety (including witness intimidation), endanger evidence, or incite flight from prosecution. It was a limited and extraordinary power. The Patriot Act greatly expanded potential justifications for delay. The criminal code now allows secret search warrants whenever notice would "jeopardize" an investigation or "delay" a trial -- extremely broad rationales. The exception has become the rule. Congress should remove that catch-all justification and impose strict monitoring on the use of these secret warrants. The other primary problem is the "library records" provision, Section 215. This amended a minor section of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a specialized court for the review of spy-hunting surveillance and search requests. This "business records" section allowed agents to seize personal records held by certain types of third-parties, including common carriers and vehicle rental companies. The Patriot Act made two changes to this relatively limited power: It allowed the seizure of any "tangible thing" from any third-party record holder (including medical, library, travel and genetic records); and it removed the particularized suspicion required in the original statute. Pre-2001, investigators had to show "specific and articulable facts" -- a standard much lower than criminal probable cause -- that a target was a spy or terrorist. Now, that already low standard has been lowered further. Agents simply certify to the intelligence court that the records desired are relevant to an investigation -- any investigation -- and the judge has no real authority to question that assertion, rendering judicial review meaningless. Reformers on the left and right want two fixes to this section. First, reinstall the individualized suspicion requirement. This reflects the Fourth Amendment notion that the government cannot invade privacy and gather evidence unless it has reasonable suspicion that one has done wrong. The proposed "fix" would retain the section's broad "tangible things" scope, but with a safeguard gainst abuse. The authorities would still be able to go to a criminal grand jury to demand the production of the same records, providing additional flexibility for counterterrorism work. Second, Congress should require additional reporting requirements. There are other refinements desired by the Act's critics. The new definition of domestic terrorism in Section 802 can be used by prosecutors to turn on an array of invasive new authorities, including broad asset-forfeiture powers, even when the underlying crime does not rise to the level of "terrorism." The preferred legislative reform keeps the definition, but links it to specific crimes like assassination or kidnapping. Reasonable critics of the expansive provisions of the Patriot Act, on both sides of the aisle and in both Houses, have introduced legislation that would implement these modest changes. Far from gutting the Act, these would secure the important powers of the law, but place modest limits on their use. For most of us who voted for the Act, what sealed the deal was the inclusion of provisions that would require us to take a sober second look at the most contentious provisions in the Act by the end of 2005, before reauthorizing them. That time is coming, and the Justice Department does not want to lose the emergency powers it won in the aftermath of 9/11. But Congress should resist its overtures, move forward on the sunsets, and enact additional Patriot fixes if it believes them needed. Mr. Barr is a former Republican congressman. -- In Time of War By JONATHAN KARL October 29, 2004 The Wall Street Journal The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted extraordinary national security measures and, inevitably, shrill warnings that our civil liberties and freedom of speech are threatened as never before. Americans are usually too eager to sacrifice freedom for security during times of war, and there are legitimate civil-liberties concerns raised by measures like the Patriot Act. Still, it is a gross distortion of history to say there is now an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech. Far from it. As Geoffrey Stone explains in "Perilous Times" (Norton, 730 pages, $35) wartime in the past has prompted far greater curtailments of the First Amendment. Sometimes they are justified but often they are not. His book, he notes, is "about heroes and villains." The heroes are those who defended the First Amendment when it was most imperiled, the villains those who exploited real and imaginary fears merely to silence dissent. Among the worst villains in Mr. Stone's account is President Woodrow Wilson, and for good reason. At the onset of America's entry into World War I, Wilson pushed through Congress the Sedition Act of 1918, which Mr. Stone calls "the most extreme antispeech legislation" in American history. And Wilson tried to make it harsher, pushing for broader powers. "Authority to exercise censorship over the press," Wilson argued, "is absolutely necessary to the public safety." One of his congressional allies reasoned: "In a time of war, while men are giving up their sons," the press loses the right to publish things that the president "thinks would be hurtful to the United States." The press-censorship provision was narrowly defeated, but Wilson retained more than enough power to crack down on dissent. He saw World War I as a contest of wills and believed that efforts to undermine support for the war played into Germany's hands. Outspoken opponents of the war were branded disloyal and routinely sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison, sometimes for merely passing out leaflets or giving a speech. Eugene Debs, who had received more than a million votes as the socialist candidate for president five years earlier, attacked Wilson's efforts to limit dissent, saying: "It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make Democracy safe in the world." For his comments he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Under the Wilson standard, John Kerry could do jail time for claiming that the president led the U.S. into "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time." Fortress of Protection Mr. Stone's First Amendment heroes include Teddy Roosevelt, who loudly opposed Wilson's efforts to crack down on dissent, and Judge Learned Hand, who Mr. Stone says helped to turn his friend and mentor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, into a champion of "the marketplace of ideas." Justice Holmes had upheld the conviction of Eugene Debs in one of his early First Amendment decisions. His later decisions viewed the amendment more broadly, constructing a judicial "fortress" of protection around political speech and helping to make something like the Debs prosecution unthinkable today. (Wilson's successor, Warren Harding, pardoned Debs and invited him to the White House.) J. Edgar Hoover makes a brief cameo appearance as a hero, urging FDR not to go forward with the mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He returns pages later as a First Amendment villain during the McCarthy period. Mr. Stone is a constitutional scholar and a zealous defender of free speech, but he is also a great storyteller. One of the stories he vividly recounts is that of Matthew Lyon, a hot-tempered populist from the early days of the republic. Lyon was the only former indentured servant to get elected to Congress, where he forthrightly opposed what he saw as the anti-democratic agenda of the Federalists. He once became so enraged during a debate on the House floor that he spat in the face of Federalist Roger Griswold. Griswold responded by attacking him with a hickory walking stick, leaving Lyon bruised and bloodied. Lyon would become the first person indicted under the Sedition Act of 1798. At the time, America was on a war footing, fearing an invasion by France. Playing on those fears, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Sedition Act by a narrow, party-line vote. The law made false and malicious charges against the government punishable by up to two years in jail and a fine of $2,000. Lyon responded to the law by saying that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare" was "swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." He was promptly arrested. The indictment accused Lyon of trying "to bring the President and the government of the United States into contempt." Found guilty, Lyon was immediately dragged on a two-day journey under armed guard to a prison far away from his hometown of Rutledge, Vt. "Repressing speech because it is dangerous to the national interest is one thing," writes Mr. Stone. "Suppressing it because it threatens a partisan interest is something else entirely. As the Sedition Act of 1798 demonstrates, it is often difficult to tell the difference." Not really. The Sedition Act clearly targeted partisan opponents of the president. All told, 14 people were indicted for sedition, including the editors of four of the top five opposition newspapers. Not a single member of the Federalist party was indicted. A tougher case came with the Civil War, where the threat of rebellion was an undisputed fact and the nation truly imperiled. Lincoln was willing to clamp down on civil liberties and of course suspended habeas corpus. Faced with draft riots and desertions in the war's darkest days, he had no problem arresting those who urged draft evasion or desertion. "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts," Lincoln asked, "while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" But Mr. Stone shows that Lincoln tolerated dissent even in America's most perilous time. "On balance," he writes, "the nation suffered only a very limited -- and largely unsystematic -- interference with free expression during the civil war." When one of Lincoln's generals shut down the virulently anti-Lincoln Chicago Times, Lincoln ordered him to let the newspaper reopen. "Lincoln recognized," Mr. Stone writes, "that excessive suppression of dissent could backfire and prove politically counterproductive." And that has been the case throughout American history. Getting jailed under the Sedition Act saved Matthew Lyon's political career. In 1798, he faced dim political prospects, but his trial turned him into something of a national hero and he was overwhelmingly re- elected -- from his jail cell. As for Adams, outrage over the Sedition Act helped fuel his defeat in 1800 and the demise of his Federalist Party. Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, the debate over the Patriot Act will play no such decisive role. Mr. Karl is a senior correspondent for ABC News. -- Patriot Act Misinformation October 1, 2004; Page A14 The Wall Street Journal The American Civil Liberties Union has been spinning its victory in a federal court in New York this week as a blow against the USA Patriot Act. One typical headline: "Federal Judge Calls Patriot Act Secret Searches Unconstitutional." An ACLU press release hails the decision as "a landmark victory against the Ashcroft Justice Department." Well, no. If reporters had bothered to read Judge Victor Marrero's decision, they would have learned that the law he actually struck down was a provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Section 2709 authorizes the FBI to issue "National Security Letters" to obtain information from wire communications companies about their subscribers. NSLs are issued secretly and the recipient is prohibited from notifying anyone about the request. As Judge Marrero noted in his ruling, "Section 2790 has been available to the FBI since 1986." He concludes that there must have been "hundreds" of NSLs issued since that time. The Patriot Act did amend Section 2790, but that amendment has nothing to do with the part that Judge Marrero says is unconstitutional. One more thing: The Electronics Communications Act was not the invention of John Ashcroft. It was sponsored by that famous and menacing right-winger, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who said at the time that Section 2790 "provides a clear procedure for access to telephone toll records in counterintelligence investigations." -- April 6, 2005 Because such provisions are implemented in secret, it wasn't publicly known until yesterday's hearing how often they have been used or -- in the assessment of critics -- misused. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the expiring provisions yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that the Justice Department has never used Patriot Act powers to retrieve library, medical or gun-sales records. The law -- an acronym for Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 . . . The subject under discussion is the "administrative subpoena," which would allow the FBI to subpoena documents without first going to a judge in emergency situations involving national security. Congress long ago gave the FBI administrative subpoena power for cases involving narcotics, health-care fraud, child pornography, and a host of other areas in which fast action can make a difference. A party served with an administrative subpoena can challenge it in court if it believes it is unwarranted. end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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